Hoover was not a laissez-faire ideologue—he increased federal spending, tried to coordinate businessmen to prevent wage cuts, and created the RFC—but this is distinct from being a proto-New Dealer; his anti-collapse efforts were limited by his discomfort with anything resembling nationalization and by a federal government too small to counter the Depression's severity.

The contraction of the money supply during the Depression was the fault of the Federal Reserve, not Hoover.

World War I was a watershed that flipped the US from the world's great borrower to the world's great creditor, so after the war every belligerent nation owed money largely to the United States while having little productive capacity left to repay it, creating a structurally disadvantageous global debt configuration.

A Bretton-Woods-style settlement and a Marshall-Plan-equivalent after WWI might have averted the Great Depression and possibly WWII, but while economically plausible on Keynes's own terms, its political plausibility was nil because there were too many dead Frenchmen and Englishmen to generate sympathy for aiding Germany.

The Depression's banking collapse was self-reinforcing: with no deposit insurance and depleted state and private relief, the unemployed drew down savings and pressured banks; as foreign, stock, and municipal debts defaulted, banks weakened, and once their distress became visible, runs ensued—a cascade with no institutional brake under Hoover.

The Federal Reserve's deliberate effort to curb stock-market speculation by raising interest rates—starting in 1928—made US investment more attractive than overseas, reducing capital exports and causing countries dependent on American money (especially Germany) to suffer even before the 1929 crash.

Policymaking in 2008 raced in 6-10 weeks through the same recapitalization sequence (lend against distressed assets, then realize you must buy bank stock to recapitalize) that took from January 1932 (RFC) to March 1933 (FDR) in the Depression—encouraging for recovery speed, but the rapidity itself unsettles investors and consumers who can't catch their breath.

Recovery to pre-crash employment levels arrived only in the first year of WWII (about 12 years after the crash) and was not a private recovery but one driven largely by government defense contracting, with agencies like the WPA re-tasked toward war preparedness.

Social Security in the 1930s was trivial as a recovery policy—a very small number of people collected very small amounts, mostly symbolic—but it was significant as a reform policy designed to make future downturns less severe, only later growing into a major program.

The agricultural sector had long lobbied for an equivalent of the protective tariff—price supports for farmers comparable to the protection manufacturers received—which they finally obtained through the AAA, which taxed processing to limit production and support prices.

Keynes argued in The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the pre-WWI world was an economic utopia in which goods, capital, and people moved freely—lifting Malthusian fetters on growth—and that the Versailles Treaty's failure to reconstruct Europe would produce a depression in which desperate men would overthrow civilization, a prediction that proved largely accurate.

The lasting phase of the New Deal operated on the principle of 'countervailing power'—rather than the federal government directly setting prices and wages, it enabled organized groups to bargain for themselves (Wagner Act for unions), made regions self-sufficient (TVA electrifying the South), and gave workers security (Social Security), so that the government's role became enabling people to act for themselves rather than acting for them.

The Supreme Court initially struck down major New Deal programs, Roosevelt then threatened to expand (pack) the Court, and the Court subsequently became more accommodating—though there is genuine controversy over which way the causation runs.

After WWI the US erected high tariffs and immigration barriers, so foreign nations could neither sell goods to nor emigrate to the US, leaving them dependent on continued American lending to service debts and rebuild—a closed-off system that placed sustained strain on European economies.

Americans' attitudes toward debt flipped after WWI, doubling household debt over the 1920s as installment credit (e.g., GMAC financing cars sold on novelty rather than need) gave rise to modern consumer culture where people bought because they could get credit, not because they had money.

Hoover's attempt to prevent wage cuts by coordinating employers was ineffective because firms simply laid people off instead—keeping the same wages but reducing headcount, so the stream of money to the economy still fell—and would have been ill-advised even if effective, since keeping wages high blocked the labor-market readjustment that falling wages would have produced.

The stock market crash transmitted to the real economy through an uncertainty mechanism: because 1920s borrowing depended on the perception that times were improving (with the stock market as the index of that), the crash triggered an immediate collapse in consumer spending and borrowing, visible in plummeting new automobile registrations through 1930.

Roosevelt's bank holiday allowed federal auditors to certify sound banks (which proved to be the vast majority) and shutter the rest, which restored confidence, brought deposits flooding back, halted the cascade of bank failures, and set the country on the road to federal deposit insurance (the FDIC), created initially against Roosevelt's own judgment.

Going off the gold standard and devaluing the dollar to $35/ounce drew foreign deposits into US banks and, combined with FDIC-restored domestic deposits and RFC recapitalization, increased the high-powered money supply enough that some economists argue these monetary measures alone could have produced recovery—though later inflows owed more to capital fleeing Nazi Europe than to devaluation, confounding the verdict.

The New Deal was not a coherent program springing from Roosevelt's mind but emerged from conflict among president, Congress, and courts; it can only be defined in retrospect as what survived after certain experiments failed or proved politically untenable, with the survivors partly shaped by the obstacles they had to circumvent.